Beilock Proposes Reform to Higher Education

On January 25th, President Sian Beilock published an editorial in The Wall Street Journal entitled “Is a Four-Year College Degree Worth It?” This is not a headline you’d expect to see from a university president; too often, we see America’s college administrators treat the importance of a four-year degree as an axiomatic truth, so bravo to President Beilock for acknowledging the validity of this question. Beilock offers several ways for colleges to address the current doubts about the American college system; some merit further questioning, while others are simply common sense.

The first of Beilock’s major points is that colleges must increase affordability, and she cites a number of ways in which Dartmouth has done so over recent years. No arguments here. It is fortunate that Beilock cited the importance of a robust alumni network as a necessary mechanism for providing the funds to make college more affordable. In my view, the unspoken point here is that a robust alumni network, and yes, one that considers legacy in admissions, is a small price to pay in exchange for giving financial aid to the majority of Dartmouth students.

With all of that being said, it is important to note that the call for college affordability need not be diluted by calls for student loan repayments (or student loan transfer, to avoid the more euphemistic term). Moreover, the hefty price of a college degree ought to say something about the potentially more economically practical idea of a two-year-degree, or direct entry into the workforce in the form of a trade. This is a point that I wish Beilock would have raised in her article: the fact that too many people are attending college, and the default high school-to-college pipeline is a cultural problem that sorely needs addressing. Another solution Beilock fails to put forth is the elimination of adminstrative bloat. Colleges, and thus students, could save money if they weren’t paying for useless offices and programs. According to a March 2025 report from the American Enterprise Institute, administrative bloat is concentrated in elite universities, which feel “free to hire legions of nonteaching staff.” Beilock desperately needs to acknowledge this problem.

Beilock’s argument about affordability is a natural segue into the second of her major points regarding the necessity of some type of post-graduation guarantee for students. She leaves open the possibility of a guarantee of admission to certain graduate schools or the securing of a paid internship prior to graduation. This is a noble goal, certainly; every college wants what’s best for its students. However, the idea of a guarantee implants a degree of hesitancy in me that gives flashbacks to the No Child Left Behind Act’s necessity of 100% literacy rates: if you set an impossible goal, you’re going to have unfavorable results. Recruiters and graduate school admissions officers trust the Dartmouth name because they can assume with reasonable certainty that the students they accept will have gone through a sufficiently rigorous process and have triumphed over many other qualified applicants from the same school. If every applicant becomes qualified for something, where is the certainty? It is vital that the College not jeopardize its relationship with the companies and schools with which it has built trust over so many years. This certainly would appear to run against one of Beilock’s later points about equality of outcome. With that being said, I acknowledge that the College should, of course, do everything in its power to help its students. I merely question whether mandating job offers and graduate school admissions for even the least dedicated students is the most effective way to do that. It risks rewarding a decline in academic performance and scholarly standards.

Beilock’s third point is one that has been made in the pages of The Review for decades. She criticizes institutions of higher education which indulge in and condone political activism, particularly, as we all well know, in favor of one ideology. Beilock reaffirmed Dartmouth’s commitment to institutional restraint as an example for many to follow. This is, by far, the most compelling argument, and, in my estimation, the greatest accomplishment of Beilock’s administration.

Grade inflation is another problem that President Beilock highlights as detrimental to the academic system. Few would disagree with this in principle. As Beilock puts it, an A loses its meaning when it becomes the norm. However, I question the degree to which the solutions proposed are the remedy. Enforced medians, for all of their benefits, create artificial scarcity of certain grades and provide no way to distinguish between a class of low-performing students and a class of particularly high achievers studying the same material. Perhaps the solution lies in changing the coursework and overall class difficulty in a way that notably distinguishes the recipient of a Dartmouth education from everybody else. Dartmouth’s policy of retaining median grades on a college transcript correctly paints a full picture to any potential recruiters or graduate school admissions officers, and an enforced curve is not necessary to accompany this tool if medians naturally follow a normal distribution. Employers will come to appreciate the quality of their new hires when they outperform their peers, not when they submit artificially high grades that conform to the trends of grade inflation.

Beilock concludes with yet another compelling point: the necessity for educational institutions to reinstate standardized testing, which is the best, most accurate predictor of college success, despite what some have been known to claim about parental income. Dartmouth has certainly done its part by rescinding the test-optional policy imposed during the COVID-era, and several other colleges have followed suit. Any university that wants to better its public image and present itself as a place of learning and merit ought to end this ostensibly temporary policy. After all, upon what else are universities supposed to rely, high school transcripts?

Despite a few areas of contention that merit further review, President Beilock’s piece is one that is illustrative of some of the largest problems facing institutions of higher education today. What I would argue is that larger than any of these problems is the inability of other academic institutions and their administrators to acknowledge that these problems exist. Indeed, if academics cannot agree on what the most formidable obstacles to our success are, then we ought not to expect the problem to be resolved in the near term. In any case, for now, I am proud to attend a college with a president who is setting an example for other institutions of higher learning to look to. The College’s emphasis on the liberal arts and the principle of learning will, more than anything, work to deconstruct the culture of distrust that many Americans have toward higher education.